The present invention relates to the use of distributed management in a telephony system. Distributed management can provide a significant improvement in system performance and resource utilization. The underlying technology disclosed herein has been used in certain computing applications, but has not yet been used in the telephony arena.
One universal feature of telephone switching equipment is the requirement that it be able to manipulate enormous quantities of data. This data comes in the form of user identification, user privileges, telephone extensions, trunks to other switches, and many others.
Another feature common to all telephone switches, and arguably even more critical, is the inherently real-time nature of the data manipulation that such switches must perform. Even a slight delay in the routing of a call is perceived by users of a telecommunication system as a problem. In large part, this requirement has defined the evolution of telephone switching equipment and telephone network architectures.
With this background, data manipulation has generally been performed by switching equipment in a proprietary and highly integrated manner. Local switching systems tend to be custom designed in order to meet local performance requirements. While meeting local needs, this raises problems at the interfaces between switching systems.
One negative result that grew out of this situation was redundancy between services performed by interacting switching systems. Basic services would be performed repeatedly as data passed from one switching system to the next, lowering overall performance of data transport. An additional problem lies in the necessity of ensuring that each switching system was capable of interfacing with each other system with which it exchanged data. Further, integration of these switching systems with non-telephony equipment was limited. A lack of common interface standards meant that telephony systems were limited in their performance, maintainability, and usability.
The present invention provides both methods and apparatus of improving upon the current state of telephone switching using the concept of distributed management. By drawing upon techniques and architectures used in the computer industry but not yet applied to telephony systems, throughput and response time can be significantly improved.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a novel method of routing non-call related applications across a switch interface wherein the transport method is transparent to the communicating switches involved.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a novel telecommunication system in which signaling channels are used for data exchange.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a novel method of synchronizing the state of data which needs to be updated and which is maintained at multiple telecommunication devices such that the required changes are made at all such devices or at none.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide a novel telecommunications network wherein processes and applications are distributed amongst a number of hardware locations.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a novel method and apparatus of allowing a computer to interact with a telephone switch through the use of a local area network.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a novel command structure for use in a telecommunication system which allows a querying switch to receive requested notification without the queried switches having to maintain addressing information of the querying switch.
These and many other objects and advantages of the present invention will be readily apparent to one skilled in the art to which the invention pertains from a perusal of the claims, the appended drawings, and the following detailed description of the preferred embodiments.